The present invention generally relates to VLF/LF communications and, more particularly, to a spatial combiner for connection to a digital VLF/LF receiver used in conjunction with a direction-sensitive antenna suite and receiving spread-spectrum signals, wherein the spatial combiner is provided to improve receiver performance in the presence of interference arriving from directions different than the communication signal being received.
For direction-sensitive antenna suites normally used for VLF/LF communications , a pair of orthogonal loop antennas , with or without an omnidirectional antenna, for manual steering of the antennas has been the standard. Efforts to implement electronic steering have focussed on adaptive antenna steering algorithms of various types which do not require operator interactions. Performance of these algorithms is sensitive to the properties of the antenna and the received communication signal and interferers.
Consequently, a need exists for an alternative approach in which performance is substantially insensitive to the properties of the antenna and the received communication signal and inference.